Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk

Peter Garside was educated at Cambridge and Harvard Universities and taught English Literature for more than thirty years at Cardiff University, where he became Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research. Subsequently he was appointed Professor of Bibliography and Textual Studies at the University of Edinburgh, where he is now a Professorial Fellow. He was one of the general editors of the bibliographical survey The English Novel 1770-1829 (2000) and has since co-edited the critical collection English and British Fiction 1750-1820 (2015). More recent work includes editions of Walter Scott’s Shorter Poems (2020) and J. G. Lockhart’s Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk (2 volumes, 2022). Gillian Hughes, Independent Scholar, has been a General Editor of the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg, and is currently an advisory editor for the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott’s Poetry and for the New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. She has published critical editions of works by each of these writers, and also a biography of James Hogg.

• VOULME ONEAims of the EditionVolume Editors’ AcknowledgementsNote on the Present EditionPeter’s Letters to his KinsfolkVOLUME TWOIntroduction1. Genesis2. Composition and Publication3. Early Responses4. The ‘Third’ and Subsequent Editions5. The Present TextEmendation ListHyphenation ListExplanatory NotesThe EngravingsIndex

Part fictional travelogue, part manifesto for Romantic cultural nationalism, Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk set the agenda for Scottish cultural criticism well into the twentieth century. This superb critical edition recaptures the gossipy zest as well as polemical seriousness of Lockhart’s anatomy of personalities and institutions in the ‘Age of Scott’.